CfP: Biopolitcal Matters, Symposium Warwick 13–14 June 2016

Biopolitcal Matters: What is biopolitics today? What are its discontents? Is there life after biopolitics?

The Authority & Political Technologies (APT) network at Warwick aims to foster and support work in the critical social sciences that is informed by Foucauldian, Deleuzian and cultural-theory perspectives. In particular we are interested in work that carries forwards these traditions, but which takes seriously the arguments concerning their failure to speak to the ethical and political demands of the present; that is to say work that is striving to refigure and reinvent the ethical and political dimension of these perspectives for contemporary problematics.

In this our second biannual symposium we address transformations in what constitutes ‘biopolitical matters’ – including changing practices of how forms of life are understood, measured, hierarchized, produced and controlled – and their relevance in contemporary theoretical and political debate. We invite papers that explore plural and divergent accounts of biopolitics, from its original treatment by Michel Foucault, through its expanded use in an array of settings to address the merging of life and politics, to contemporary approaches that question the ‘bio’ as the frame of politics. This includes new regimes of police and security; environmental catastrophe in the Anthropocene, and new questions about ‘big data’ and its increasingly powerful behaviouralism. We encourage submissions from a range of disciplines including, but not limited to, anthropology, cultural studies, geography, history, law, philosophy, politics and sociology. In addition to standard conference papers we welcome proposals for panel discussions, films, exhibits and performance.